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A Novel
by Joseph Earl Thomas
After a deployment in the Iraq War dually defined by threat and interminable mundanity, Joseph Thomas is fighting to find his footing.
Now a doctoral student at The University, and an EMS worker at the hospital in North Philly, he encounters round the clock friends and family from his past life and would-be future at his job, including contemporaries of his estranged father, a man he knows little about, serving time at Holmesburg prison for the statutory rape of his then-teenage mother. Meanwhile, he and his best friend Ray, a fellow vet, are alternatingly bonding over and struggling with their shared experience and return to civilian life, locked in their own rhythms of lust, heartbreak, and responsibility.
Balancing the joys and frustrations of single fatherhood, his studies, and ceaseless shifts at the hospital as he becomes closer than he ever imagined to his father, Joseph tries to articulate vernacular understandings of the sociopolitical struggles he recounts as participant-observer at home, against the assumptions of his friends and colleagues. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a powerful examination of every day black life—of health and sex, race and punishment, and the gaps between our desires and our politics.
"This is an astonishingly accomplished novel, often funny, often tragic...Just stunning." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[M]agnificent...In a remarkable feat of formal invention, Thomas collapses time and space, melding Joey's memories with descriptions of patients in the ER...Thomas scales great heights with this innovative blend of social realism and surrealism." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer of incredible gifts. The voice here is so distinctive, galloping with intelligence, poetry, honesty, and humor. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer spun me around, like many of my favorite novels, it reads like direct communication from the soul." ―Justin Torres, author of Blackouts
"God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is Joseph Earl Thomas' formidable, groundbreaking debut. There's so much magic in the rare combination of tenderness, humor, and heartbreak contained in this story. Our narrator, Joseph, is unlike any character I've read, just as Thomas' debut has no equal." ―Cleyvis Natera, author of Neruda on the Park
"Joseph Earl Thomas's God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is a brilliant novel of hunger and work and care and grief that deftly captures the maddening mess of everything that makes life worth living. Thomas is a skilled, surgical prose stylist; his sentences are magnificent scalpels. There isn't a single dull line in the book. God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer is unpredictable, unsentimental, and impressively tender." ―Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
This information about God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Joseph Earl Thomas is a writer from Frankford whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in VQR, N+1, Gulf Coast, The Offing, and The Kenyon Review. He has an MFA in prose from The University of Notre Dame and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. An excerpt of his memoir, Sink, won the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and he has received fellowships from Fulbright, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. He's writing the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, and a collection of stories, Leviathan Beach, among other oddities.
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